Trade and public policy

For more than 30 years I nego­ti­at­ed, ana­lyzed and advised on inter­na­tion­al trade agree­ments, most­ly for gov­ern­ments (I was an Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment offi­cial for about half of that time). Occa­sion­al­ly I con­sult­ed to pri­vate inter­ests includ­ing indus­try and traders’ asso­ci­a­tions, cham­bers of com­merce and some­times firms caught-up in a ‘trade rem­e­dy’ action.

☞ You’ll find ten years of posts com­ment­ing on events and oppor­tu­ni­ties in the inter­na­tion­al trade sys­tem here on my site.

For rea­sons I’ve exam­ined here, the momen­tum of trade agree­ments slowed after the Doha round col­lapsed at the end of 2008. Australia’s trade nego­ti­a­tions pro­gram slipped into neu­tral as bilat­er­al trade nego­ti­a­tions with North and East Asia ran into the sand.

Then Andrew Robb, Trade Min­is­ter in Tony Abbott’s con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment con­clud­ed nego­ti­a­tions with Korea, Japan and Chi­na with­in a year; most­ly by decid­ing to accept what was on the table after a decade of talks. (He was helped in each case by the rapid col­lapse of the Aus­tralian auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try faced with low pro­tec­tion and an end to sub­si­dies.) Over­all, with trade growth tank­ing due large­ly to China’s weak­er demand out­look, it was time to make the best of the sit­u­a­tion and move on… to the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship.

The TPP nego­ti­a­tions absorbed a lot of offi­cial ener­gies for five or six years, but Pres­i­dent Trump decid­ed — appar­ent­ly on poor advice — not to seek rat­i­fi­ca­tion of the final draft. It is not clear from the (scant) eco­nom­ic mod­el­ing that TPP offered great val­ue. Still, the final draft was sig­nif­i­cant for Aus­tralia to the extent that it com­mit­ted us to zero­ing of our tar­iff at last (on a pref­er­en­tial basis, cer­tain­ly, but across a very big share of our trade; the same treat­ment had been extend­ed sep­a­rate­ly to Chi­na in the AUSCHNFTA). The neg­a­tive list on ser­vices trade is much more dif­fi­cult to parse; it may be noth­ing more than a sort of pol­i­cy stand­still. More ana­lyt­i­cal work is need­ed there. The Invest­ment chap­ter looks good on paper (still, the wretched “nation­al inter­est” test is pre­served) and the IP chap­ter appears no more nox­ious than feared (but we had already betrayed pro­por­tion­al­i­ty in the AUSFTA).

As for WTO… Although the Organ­i­sa­tion and Treaty still pro­vide essen­tial ser­vices (includ­ing Dis­pute Set­tle­ment), it is look­ing more and more like a place­hold­er for what­ev­er comes next. The for­mal mul­ti­lat­er­al frame­work of inter­na­tion­al com­mer­cial exchange is flac­cid and tot­ter­ing. The Trade Facil­i­ta­tion Agree­ment reached in 2013 — the only new WTO Agree­ment in 20 years — is a state­ment of inten­tion rather than a con­tract with bind­ing oblig­a­tions.

I remain engaged in pol­i­cy-analy­sis activ­i­ties; I con­tin­ue to teach in the Mas­ters of Inter­na­tion­al Trade & Devel­op­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ade­laide (below).

In Feb­ru­ary 2015, I com­plet­ed a cen­ten­ni­al his­to­ry of the Inter­na­tion­al Cham­ber of Com­merce; prob­a­bly the strongest and cer­tain­ly the most endur­ing and con­sis­tent advo­cate of pri­vate enter­prise and lib­er­al trade poli­cies through the 20th cen­tu­ry. Pub­li­ca­tion has, how­ev­er, been post­poned by the ICC until 2019 which is the cen­te­nary of its for­mal con­sti­tu­tion (although not of its con­cep­tion). Prob­lems of data and scope posed quite a few chal­lenges for me: the final draft is, nec­es­sar­i­ly, a sort of his­to­ry of the world econ­o­my from 1914 to 2014 inter­wo­ven with the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of this remark­able insti­tu­tion. For­tu­nate­ly, there were also some intrigu­ing char­ac­ters who played an impor­tant role in ICC’s his­to­ry as they did, too, in the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment and busi­ness. Their sto­ries lift the nar­ra­tive.

Human (medical) research ethics

For more than a decade, I’ve been for­tu­nate to have been appoint­ed to the Ethics com­mit­tee of [a major pub­lic hospital](http://www.alfredresearch.org/ “the Alfred Ethics site”) in Mel­bourne, with a large research and teach­ing port­fo­lio. The hos­pi­tal has a lead­ing rep­u­ta­tion in trau­ma research and an asso­ci­at­ed insti­tu­tion is a well-recog­nised cen­tre for “first-in-man” tri­als of drugs and devices. It’s excit­ing to observe the front-lines of med­ical research and care, although rapid­ly improv­ing tech­nolo­gies some­times make knot­ty prob­lems out of once-straight­for­ward eth­i­cal choic­es.

There’s anoth­er inter­est for me, too. The foun­da­tions of what we now call empiri­cism began with med­ical research. The most active mem­bers of the Roy­al Soci­ety (and of the Académie des Sci­ences, for that mat­ter) in the late 17th Cen­tu­ry — where the ‘sci­en­tif­ic method’ first secured a rhetor­i­cal beach-head — were physi­cians, many of them stu­dents of the great empir­i­cal anatomist William Har­vey. Still today, evi­dence-based pub­lic pol­i­cy finds its con­cep­tu­al roots in the med­ical sci­ences.

Teaching

I’m teach­ing grad­u­ate stu­dents at Ade­laide Uni­ver­si­ty the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of trade and a research-meth­ods course that grows out of my inter­est in the use of sta­tis­tics (and visu­al pre­sen­ta­tion of data) to rep­re­sent the com­plex inter­ac­tions of world mar­kets and pro­duc­tion. I’m a long-time devo­tee — ama­teur, in every sense — of [the sta­tis­ti­cal lan­guage “R”](http://www.r-project.org/ “the R project”) and have begun to use it in the [course materials](http://petergallagher.com.au/index.php/site/article/statistics-for-non-mathematical-trade-analysts).

Peter Gallagher

Peter Gallagher is student of piano and photography. He was formerly a senior trade official of the Australian government. For some years after leaving government, he consulted to international organizations, governments and business groups on trade and public policy.

He teaches graduate classes at the University of Adelaide on trade research methods and the role of firms in trade and growth and tweets trade (and other) stuff from @pwgallagher